Main Street

Water, Water Everywhere–But is it Safe to Drink?

Real-life circumstances are yet again making the point: Public services are not free. One way or another, they have to be paid for.

Now it’s water, not just in one state but in cities and towns across the country. You’d think people would want the water they drink to be clean and safe, but apparently too many of us have gotten used to paying next to nothing for the water we drink and cook with, shower in and flush down the toilet. Our water systems are crumbling and overflowing, sometimes with raw sewage, and it still hasn’t fully sunk in that fixing this will take real money—but it’s worth doing right.

Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.

In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.

As the head of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority is quoted pointing out, “People pay more for their cellphones and cable television than for water…You can go a day without a phone or TV. You can’t go a day without water.”

As Atrios notes,

I’ve long chafed at those who suggested “shovel ready projects” were hard to find as fixing water/sewer systems is both an obvious need and in many places fairly simple. Dig up road, replace pipe, fix road, repeat. There are places with more complex engineering issues, of course.

This is the choice: Either we pay—whether in water bills or taxes—for significant repairs to the nation’s crumbling water and sewer systems, or we have more and more pipe breaks and contaminated water. There’s a whole political industry dedicated to obscuring that fact, but in the end it really is that simple.

Tags: infrastructure, public services